What are some strategies to outrank your retailers who use the same page content as you?

[odegi]

I do not want to piss off our retailers by complaining about copyright infringement for product content, so what are some ways to outrank them using the same content???

[jesse-landry]

Use different content?

I'm not sure I understand. Can you provide examples? I can't think of a reason why you couldn't build different/better content.

[odegi]

Yes it sounds easy enough, but we have 100 plus products, we just spent tons of money having professional FDA expert writers write good valuable content for each of them, but now our retailers are copying word for word most of products. Since it is a natural health company, the FDA restricts a lot of our wording. Some of our retailers have been online longer than us and have higher DA and PR, we were thinking that we should write content specifically for our retailers and just for our website, but this will require tons of money and time...

[RobMay]

That's pretty straight forward and almost answers itself

What you need to do is rework all the product descriptions you sell (that are/might be duplicated on 1 or 25, 50 of 100 sites). You need to work on then optimizing the framework of your site (technical work), write great compelling titles and description tags, good H1-H2 usage throughout, copy placement, integrate UGC (user generated comment) to write product reviews and notes on current inventory or sales experiences, and of course have some sort of plan sketched out for a social media and marketing push to build awareness and traffic to the site - it'll be difficult. All the while and doing all this you need to consider some sort of content development strategy (blog?) which could highlight certain products daily? weekly? monthly? Integrate that into a media delivery email campaign to gain new potential sales leads from site visitors, offer promotions too, etc? Opportunities are endless here and sometime frustrating as you work through and find the right formula that works.

I always fine these problems fun to work out. Sometimes I get carried away!

It's not an easy job, I won't lie. I recently had a client on a site for a client like that with over 1000 individual products (and that's small compared to some enterprise-level sites now) and it's a long process to do, but as you work through it, optimize it, test it, re-test it, re-work it again and again, you'll find the right formula to get those page indexed and ranking. Adding that personal touch to descriptions by re-writing them as well, gives you opportunity to leverage other potential KW's for POW (points of entry) from/through organic search, keeping in line with the primary KW's you are trying to target.

Create a great user experiences as well Look to see what the other sites are missing. Look at the site from a 'buyer' perspective', what can you improve on? image galleries? sign ups? search function to improve product location? etc.. I don't think the other sites who are ranking above you, have all that nailed down, unless they are a global client like Target, Walmart, etc, etc. There is always room to improve !!

Hope some of that helps. It should get you started for sure!

[jesse-landry]

Okay this sheds some light.. Interesting situation.

I don't know what to tell you. There really isn't a way to "outrank them using the same content." Your best bet is to just build more links or see if they can provide a shortened version of the write-ups with a "read more" link pointing to your page. The best thing would be for them to no-crawl those specific pages..

Gosh I don't know this one has me stumped.

[jesse-landry]

Nice answer, Rob +1

[RobMay]

If he is the one producing the content (from FDA), and it's originally written by FDA approved staff, and other sites are scraping and using his content - (providing you are the first to be crawled and indexed/noted with this content), you will be credited with the content originality. The technical structure of your site will have an impact as well as the social landscape and the way people perceive your brand online.

That's all I wanted to add to that.. Don't worry so much about the content if its your original stuff. If they are ranking higher - take some of my other suggestions, build a company blog, share news and source info about the products, highlight products, specials and promo's. Build a community people will want to come back to buy, share, and support.  Build links to the content in the blog on the company site, share the info, get you product our into the right niches and circles and I think it will all come together with time.

SEO isn't an overnight success, and I can't stress that enough to clients i work with. It takes time and patience to succeed with results that stick

Cheers!

[RobMay]

Cheers buddy! We all work together !! Gotta love it.

[odegi]

Hey Rob & Jesse,

Thanks for the tips, they were quite helpful. I like the idea Jesse of asking them to shorten their content and provide a read more link. Rob I like your idea of taking advantage of h1 and product descriptions. We are also currently under a massive website change, so that will definitely help us out in the long term. But whats messed up is that the FDA legally restricts you to linking to any product pages through a blog in the natural health industry! Pharmaceutical companies really take the extra steps to lobby and screw over their competitors....

[EGOL]

(providing you are the first to be crawled and indexed/noted with this content)

I am quite certain that first to be crawled/indexed does not determine who gets the rankings - or even who will appear in the SERPs without being hit by filters or Panda problems.  The more powerful sites who are publishing the content often get the rankings or survive the filters and Panada.

If you want to avoid this problem put that essential content on an image.  Then add enough additional content to make a substantive page.  Require your resellers to use that image if you don't want them to have Panda problems or be filtered on duplicate content.

Then add enough additional content to the pages to make it substantive enough for Google to index and rank.